Kip and Frank

We booked our dive trip with Deep Sea Divers Den based on recommendations made by Frank's dive master, Terry, and also because they hold a 5-star PADI rating. As we found out late in our planning process, the best way to experience the Great Barrier Reef is to plan "liveaboards" where you go 2-4 hours out to sea and live aboard a large hotel-like vessel that is fully equipped with all the dive gear you might need. The majority of liveaboards range from 2-7 nights, the further you get out to sea, the better the diving. Because we can't dive for 24 hrs before our flight home, this limited us to finding an outfit that offered a 1-night liveaboard and we got lucky with Divers Den. The 1-night doesn't offer the best dive sites available since ... read more

After the weather forecast looked to improve today, we decided to get out of town. We took the AirBus out to the airport - the AirBus runs every 15-minutes from the downtown area of Auckland to the domestic and international terminals at Auckland’s airport. Once we arrived at the airport a short 35 minutes later, we picked up our Daihatsu economy car with manual stick-shift. It was a flashy red car only slightly larger than a SmartCar and we thought that a GPS would prevent us from getting lost. Frank was the one to take on the driving challenge with Kip acting as the co-pilot and handler of the GPS. At several points during the trip, both would fail Frank! After getting into the vehicle and programming our destination, Frank began to pull out of the ... read more

We arrived at Tauranga at 5:45am. No worries, we definitely were not up at the time. Tauranga is NZ's ninth largest city and growing fast. The population is close to 110 thousand and the city has tripled in size in the last 25 years. Due to its sheltered position on the east coast, the city enjoys a warm, dry climate. It's become a popular location to retire to but during the summer months the population swells with vacationers. We descended onto Tauranga around 10:30am and were immediately pleasantly surprised by the beautiful beaches, well kept homes, pine trees and open vistas. The clear blue skies and warm sunshine was very nice too. First on our agenda today is to climb Mount Mauao, a dormant volcano that rises 230m above sea level. Some locals had told us ... read more

The result of a compromise between the North and South Islands, Wellington became the capital of NZ in 1865, replacing Auckland that had been the capital since 1841. The city is located on the southern tip of the North Island and is the country's second largest city. Due to it's omnipresent winds, the city is also affectionately known as "Windy Wellington." It was named to honor Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington and victor of the Battle of Waterloo. We arrived in port at 7am but after sleeping in a bit, getting ready and having breakfast, we finally disembarked around 11am. Unlike our previous stops, we didn't need to hop on a shuttle bus to get to the city, downtown Wellington was only a short 20 min walk from the ship. We wandered around downtown ... read more

We arrived into the Port Chalmers this morning. The port has the typical shipyard containers and stacks of trees prepped from nearby logging operations. Port Chalmers is the closest point to dock for Dunedin. Dunedin is the second largest city on the South Island of New Zealand and the principal city of the region of Otago. It is also New Zealand’s 5th largest city in terms of population. We woke up and went upstairs to the Ocean Café. After eating breakfast, we boarded a shuttle bus into downtown Dunedin. The weather was again a mixture of rain and sunshine with a chill in the air. Once we walked around downtown and gained our bearings, we were lead to the doors of the Cadbury World by the large purple chocolate silo. We scheduled a tour of the ... read more